The reactive two-body part of the pion-nucleus optical potential

We calculate the reactive component of the two-body contribution to the pion-nucleus optical potential from a two-nucleon pion absorption mechanism that predicts the total cross section and angular distributions for π⁺d → pp very well. At threshold the calculated absorptive parts explain most of the values obtained from pionic atom level widths, whereas the dispersive parts, which are very sensitive to wave function correlations are considerably more attractive than what the conventional phenomenological parameters would suggest.